Title: キミの瞳にヒットミー
Developers: Giga & Entergram
Release Date: 23rd April 2018
Length: ~10 Hours
Links: Official Site, VNDB
This story starts shortly after the beginning of Fuzuki Akira’s 3rd year of high school. However, he’s in a bit of a pickle after his upperclassmen graduating leaves him as the sole member of the literature club. His school has a rule that all clubs must have a minimum of 5 members or face being disbanded. Akira desperately searches for new members but his efforts prove fruitless. Luckily for him his good friend is the student council president and she tells him that she’s found some girls who might be able to join and save the club. Unfortunately, upon meeting them it transpires that the four girls had all intended to create their own clubs but had yet to find members. By combining their ideas and creating the “Share Club” will this mismatched group manage to find common ground and keep their club running?
Characters
Fuzuki Akira
As he’s an only child and his parents are always working Akira has long considered his school club to be like his second family and refuses to let his beloved literature club disband without a fight. He enjoys reading and is also very studious. He’s well liked by everyone and has been a class rep every year since middle school.
Hinata Hitomi (CV Tanezaki Atsumi)
Hitomi is a very serious girl who wants to create a comedy club. Unfortunately, most of her jokes tend to fall flat though. Her goal is to make her grandmother laugh as she hasn’t even seen her smile since the death of her grandfather a few years ago. Due to her stern appearance, people tend to think that she’s angry all of the time. She really likes animals, especially cats.
Kurose Tsubasa (CV Oohashi Ayuru)
Tsubasa is a chuunibyuou girl whom believes herself to be the reincarnation of a demon lord. She wants to create a World Domination Club. She likes to help people out (as a demon lord’s work doesn’t end after she’s conquered the world, her kingdom and its people need to prosper!) and is well known around town. Her father plays along with her act but her younger brother finds her embarrassing. She really doesn’t like cats and is terrified of ghosts.
Hataya Shiina (CV Yamaguchi Kai)
Shiina is a cheerful girl that wants to create the Wonderfulness club. She enjoys people watching and finds wonder in those everyday small moments that most people would miss. She falls in love with Akira at first sight after he saves her from falling over one day. She actually loves to write poems and wants to create a poetry club but is too embarrassed to do so.
Tsukahata Miko (Toda Megumi)
After spending two years as a member of the going home club, Miko is worried about her high school days coming to an end and wants to create a youth club to treasure those precious moments and create new everlasting memories. She’s known Akira since their first year of high school and the two are currently classmates but she is often rude or cold towards him and just refers to him as “class rep”. She often does part-time jobs and is currently works in a pet shop. Miko is popular and has a lot of friends.
Kirihara Hotori (CV Uema Emi)
Hotori used to be a member of Akira’s literature club but left to become the student council president. She’s been a good friend of Akira’s throughout high school and wants to help the share club become a success. Despite her prim and proper appearance, she spends her weekends and holidays lazing around in her pajamas. She loves singing and often goes to karaoke by herself to practice.
Artwork
There were three artists responsible for the main characters: Hisama Kumako, Kurasawa Moko & Nekonyan. FFC was responsible for the SD CGs.
Sound
Console Edition Opening: Catch Light
Original Opening: Ima Sugu Hit Me!
Ending: Hoshikuzu Planitarium
All songs by Uema Emi
System
This game has a pretty simple system and the choices are location based so simply pick the girl you’d like to visit. Hotori’s route is *slightly* more complicated as you need to visit three of the girls once and the other one twice.
One interesting thing this game has is a timer when you visit the options screen while playing the game:
(this was me at the end of my final route – I promise I don’t just make up the game length I include at the start haha)
My Thoughts
I should probably say here that I literally only bought this game because I wanted to test out purchasing from the JP version of the nintendo e-shop on my new switch. I actually intended for Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai to be my first VN/galge on the system but my copy of the game hadn’t arrived yet and I’m not really known for my patience so this piece of trash cost me 5000 yen instead, yay~
Okay, it wasn’t *that* bad but the main problem the game had was that it was super short. Some of the routes (Hitomi & Hotori in particular) had routes that literally took like an hour to read. As with the majority of chara-ge, the common route was funny/interesting but the game starts to unravel when you get into the actual character routes. This game’s humour is basically lots of really bad jokes & puns from Hitori – some are “so bad they’re kinda funny” but others are just plain terrible so play at your own risk.
The characters themselves weren’t actually too bad though & they all definitely had cute points. As a protagonist, Akira actually does a fairly solid job of maintaining order when the characters’ antics get too out of control. I also found him to be pretty pro-active in most of the routes too which was appreciated.
Despite appearing to be the “main heroine” Hitomi’s route was actually fairly disappointing as the “conflict” of her route was something that could be easily solved. She is incredibly cute though.
I absolutely adore chuuni characters and am always excited to see one pop up in a game (they’re surprisingly uncommon?) so I really enjoyed Tsubasa’s long speeches and the contrast when she speaks “normally”. Her route is more about why she acts the way she does and was an enjoyable read, if a little predictable. It needs to be said that her father is hilarious too!
Shiina was actually my favourite character at the start of the game (she’s so adorable and fluffy!) but her route was the weakest of the five with there being very little plot at all and then it just ends without much resolution or anything which was a shame.
Miko is actually a really interesting character and is kind of a tsundere(?). I don’t really know how to describe her but anyway it’s clear that they put the most effort into her route as it’s the longest and arguably the best. The plot wasn’t anything special but I felt that the pacing was a lot better here than in the other routes.
Finally is Hotori; since she wasn’t a heroine in the original game I must admit that I was worried that her route would be horrendous but it was actually decent. They slotted her in pretty well and it’s a real shame that she wasn’t originally a heroine as she’s super sweet.
One of the main disappointments of this game is the poor transition of the characters as they go from friends to lovers – in most of the routes the confession comes in the first chapter or two with little build-up. This was really disappointing as (aside from two routes) the heroines don’t really appear to interact with Akira in a particularly romantic way to lead them to confess that early so you don’t get that sense of satisfaction when the pair do become a couple.
Despite there being a few different artists working on this game, the artwork and CGs were generally pretty nice with the SD CGs in particular being super adorable. There’s enough CGs given that this is a super short read and I think that Entergram did a good job adding in the extra CGs & scenes since they slot into the story perfectly, to the extent that I’m not even sure what was a new addition.
The BGM was overall pretty decent but it was the vocal songs that really stood out – I adore the new opening song (which I cannot find the full version of 😦 ) and the ending song is also really nice!
I’m not really going to comment on the fact I played this on the switch as I plan a full post about that after I’ve played a couple more games. However, I do appreciate the larger screenshots without the little copyright thingy at the bottom. I’m just glad that the voices in this one were okay as I was a bit worried after playing Harvest OverRay.
Final Thoughts
My Score: 5/10
So, basically, this game may have a cute cast of characters and a decent common route but really fails to deliver on story and romantic progression in the actual character routes which makes this game a complete disappointment in my eyes.
If you really want to play this game (Miko’s route may be worth it I guess?) then I’d highly suggest waiting for it to inevitably go on sale as the game is too short to be worth “full price”. I probably would recommend this over the original since Hotori’s route was pretty sweet but it’s also very short.
So that’s enough of this “meh” game, here’s hoping my next switch vn will be better. Oh well, my review of CharadeManiacs will be out next Friday with Koroshiya to Strawberry the following week. I’ve now moved on to Piofiore no Banshou which I’m hoping will be good. I decided to go for Nicola first and I can just tell that falling for him will be a mistake but he’s so cute. Oh well~
That’s it for this week, thanks for reading!
Zettai Renai! 